This week Chris and I learned what it’s like to be retired. Holed up in a condo in Wellington, Florida, our highlights have become our daily excursion to the grocery store. We spend our days laying like grapes by the pool, letting the sun prune us into raisins, and playing gin. This is what retired people do, right?
I grew up when TV meant 13 channels and two of those were French. But we had a giant tree in the backyard, that’s all you really needed as a kid to 
entertain yourself, one thing that your imagination could turn into anything. A pool for instance could be so many things: an ocean whose treasured depths were waiting to be explored or the arena for an epic game of Marco Polo but more often became a game of who could hold their breath the longest.
Now more than anything a pool is just a body of water that attracts both germs and screaming kids. Instead of a pool using my imagination to conjure up pirate ships and sunken treasure, it conjures up urine to water ratios.
I can understand why they say socialization and activities are the most important thing for retired people, without something to look forward to or live for, you become the type of person who keeps telemarketers on the line for hours, just so you have someone to talk to.
We’ve been in a holding pattern for the past several weeks waiting for bids to go through so we can work and make some money. But every time we seemed to get a bite the person would either not buy the thing they wanted shipped or would cancel the shipment entirely. And then we discovered that our insurance didn’t cover the trailers we were hauling, only things in the trailers, like boats or cargo. We tried so hard to do everything legitimately, expecting a few setbacks but have instead come up against a giant bureaucratic wall.
And now we’re in Florida, all we really did was change the location of our boredom. Which if you ask me, is a much better place to be bored. We have a pool, palm trees, blue skies and humidity, give me a good book to read and I’m set. Chris on the other hand is going stir crazy, give him another day and he’ll throw on a pink tutu and go dancing in the grocery store parking lot.
On Sunday we’re boarding a cruise out of Port Canaveral with my family, a trip that’s been planned for almost two years. Last week we picked up a jet ski coming to Jupiter, Florida about 25 minutes from where we are now, which paid for our trip down here.
My world, as I’m sure most others do as well, revolves around vacation time not work. (Why wasn’t I born in some European country that gets ten weeks(!!) of vacation?) It’s a sad world that revolves around just two weeks of the year (although I guess it’s better than Santa Claus whose life revolves around only one day a year). Therefore, those two weeks, usually split up into two one week chunks, become my intense focus and anticipation as I slog away at tasks that make me want to rip my eyeballs out and glue them to my desk.
But all I’ve been doing for the past couple of months is driving or sitting watching someone else do the driving (unless I’m napping). There’s been no desk involved, no story boarding, no render times to anticipate, no computer crashing at the wrong moment. This doesn’t feel like work. Which has cheapened this whole vacation thing a little bit.
Around the World in 500 Days 